How to Earn Money Out of Blogging?

Unless you are living in a dark cave inside the dense forest of Amazon, you have heard the word ‘blog’. Most blogs start to be related to hobbies or as a personal diary or to connect with friends and family.

But there are people who have left their regular 9-to-5 jobs to blogging as a full-time profession and they are called pro bloggers.

In this first section, we discuss topics like starting with blogs, choosing specific topics and general rules of blogging. In Part II, you will learn about different methods for making money from blogs using advertising and affiliate programs. Closing Part III will facilitate advanced techniques to track readers, and to adapt to your blog to get more traffic and how to change those “stare eyes” into “serious money”.

A blog is an online website, in which the post is organized in opposite chronological order. The activity of posting content on a blog is called blogging, whereas the person who writes the content is called blogger. The entire universe of blogs and bloggers is called the blogosphere.

Blogs gained a lot of popularity during the 2004 American presidential elections. Merriam-Webster also voted “Blog” as the most requested definition of the year 2004. According to Technorati, there is a service tracking the blogosphere, 33.5 million blogs and a new blog is added every second. This rate is double which the Indian population is growing.

Even when millions of blogs are already in existence, there is no such thing as a boat. It’s still a perfect time to start the blog. After all, some percent of those blogs are actually trying to make good content. It is also possible that some blogs cover topics you want to blog.

The aim of ‘professional blogging as a career’ is to help you convert your blog into a cash cow.

So let’s start. Google Blogger, MSN Space and Yahoo 360 are soon popular services for creating blogs. These services also offer professional-looking web-design templates, in which you want to change the default form-n-feel of your blog without the need of any programming skills. The only warning is that you do not have a blog domain and blog URLs will end in either blogspot.com or spaces.com/username, depending on the blogging service you choose.

Always invest a great time in choosing a blog platform because migration to a different blog platform is not only difficult (and sometimes impossible), you risk losing your site visitors and search engine rankings. To give more professional touch, you can consider purchasing your personal web domain name and installing a WordPress blog platform. WordPress is free to download, community support is excellent and millions of users are already using it. Another good option is the walkable type publishing platform.

Once you have a good blog domain, the next question in your mind is – what should I blog about? Since I want to make “real” money, should I blog about lung cancer or NYC lawyers related to asbestos, because these topics attract top paid advertisements? Or did I cook my cat, my school going daughter or my wife cooked the last night?

Choosing a place for your blog can sometimes be the toughest part. But here’s a simple answer – write on topics about which you are passionate about. Think about the topics that really interest you, on topics you can continue to write for the coming months.

Your blog can be anything about shoes, cooking, technology or even the latest events in your city. You will always find readers who are interested in your topics, provided you keep supplying them with good content. But if millions of other bloggers are already covering your favorite topics, then study their blogs and research areas that they are neglected. So you will find your place right now.

To be really successful in the form of a blogger, you always have to continue your pace. New bloggers write a lot of posts in a short period of time, or write often in long periods but should write the real goal regularly. Publish at least one good post per day. Visitors will visit your website again in the hope of seeing new updated content, it becomes your duty to not disappoint them.

Once your blog is up and running, there is a great request to invite friends and relatives. Before doing so, make sure you have written at least 10-15 good articles. All links should work and should not be “under construction” page. This can give a bad impression and the visitor may not be disturbed by you in the future.

For images, the problem becomes a bit more complicated. Always check image licenses before using it on your blog. Do not host images, because it is equal to stealing someone else’s bandwidth. If you are planning to use someone else’s image with permission, then store your copy on your server.